Technologies

Sifiso Ndlovu

How to use Microsoft Flow to extract SharePoint Online list data

May 3, 2018 by

Data extraction is a pivotal part of any business process particularly when it comes to running reports and facilitating business decision-making. In the article, How to configure OData SSIS Connection for SharePoint Online, I covered data extraction off a SharePoint Online list using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). You would have noticed in the aforementioned article that getting SSIS to successfully integrate with SharePoint Online lists can be a laborious exercise, especially if you haven’t installed the correct SharePoint SDK files. Thus, in business environments where business and Power Users have more control of data extraction processes, SSIS could get complicated for an ordinary business user to operate. Therefore, given the nature of our source data and the platform in which it resides, ETL architects and developers alike may need to find alternative ETL tools to SSIS. This brings me to Microsoft Flow which could be one possible alternative to using SSIS for data extraction. Microsoft Flow is part of Office 365 applications and just like SharePoint Online, is a cloud-based application that is freely available, easier to operate and effortlessly integrates with – amongst other applications – SharePoint Online. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the convenience of extracting data from one SharePoint Online list to another using Microsoft Flow.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

How to configure OData SSIS Connection for SharePoint Online

April 13, 2018 by

As data warehouse developers, we often have to extract data from a myriad of source systems. Thus, whilst some source systems readily integrate with our ETL tools there are instances whereby we need to install additional drivers and software addons in order to successfully connect and extract data from other source systems. Microsoft SharePoint Online is one such source system that I recently had to extract data from and its connectors are by default not part of the standard SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) package template. As SSIS developers we often don’t have solid background on environments such as SharePoint, thus figuring out which version of SharePoint Software Development Kit to install in order to enable successful connection from SSIS can sometimes be a frustrating experience. In this article, I try to alleviate some of that frustration by sharing some of my recent experiences relating to getting data out of a SharePoint list using SSIS.

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Jefferson Elias

A concrete example of migration between an Oracle Database and SQL Server using Microsoft Data Migration Assistant

April 12, 2018 by

Introduction

Intended audience

This document is intended for application developers and database administrators who plan to migrate an Oracle Database to Microsoft SQL Server.

Context

In the previous article, we saw how to install and prepare to migrate one or more Oracle Schema(s) and their objects to SQL Server. Now it’s time to go through the migration process…

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Jefferson Elias

Migrating an Oracle Database to SQL Server with Microsoft Data Migration Assistant – Installation Process and Short Overview

March 27, 2018 by

Intended audience

This document is intended for application developers and database administrators who plan to migrate an Oracle Database to Microsoft SQL Server.

Context

Nowadays, most IT professionals are aware that Oracle Database is a very good database solution, but it’s not inexpensive, to say the least. If you want to partition a table in Oracle, it’s an option that you must pay for, which is the same for advanced security options like Database Encryption or Dynamic Data Masking. In contrast, SQL Server comes with these options out of the box when you use the Enterprise Edition.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

Replace bridge tables in a Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2017 graph database

March 8, 2018 by

Just like in Santa’s Bag of Goodies, every release of SQL Server often has something for everyone – be it enhancements to DMVs for the DBAs, new functions for T-SQL developers or new SSIS control tasks for ETL developers. Likewise, the ability to effectively support many-to-many relationships type in SQL Graph has ensured that there is indeed something in it for the data warehouse developers in SQL Server 2017. In this article, we take you through the challenges of modelling many-to-many relationships in relational data warehouse environments and later demonstrate how data warehouse teams can take advantage of the many-to-many relationship feature in SQL Server 2017 Graph Database to effectively model and support their data warehouse solutions.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

How to plot a SQL Server 2017 graph database using PowerBI

January 9, 2018 by

In the article How to plot a SQL Server 2017 graph database using SQL Server R, I highlighted the lack of built-in graph data visualisation as one major limitation of the SQL Server 2017 graph database feature. In the same article, I went on to suggest making use of SQL Server R as one workaround that could be utilised in order to successfully plot and visualise diagrams out of SQL Server 2017 graph database objects. However, whilst 3rd party graph database vendors such as Neo4j provide an interactive and hyperlinked graph diagrams that allows you to – amongst other things – easily drilldown and identify node-relationships as indicated in Figure 1, the graph plotted using SQL Server R is not very interactive in fact it is simply a static image file as shown in Figure 2.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

How to plot a SQL Server 2017 graph database using SQL Server R

January 3, 2018 by

A few years ago, one common business case I came across in my professional career that required modelling of data into a many-to-many entity relationship type was the representation of a consultants and their projects. Such a business case became a many-to-many entity relationship type because whilst each project can be undertaken by several consultants, consultants can in turn be involved in many different projects. When it came to storing such data in a relational database engine, it meant that we had to make use of bridging tables and also make use of several self-joins to successfully query the data.

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Esat Erkec

How to implement a graph database in SQL Server 2017

December 19, 2017 by

Introduction

Graph database

A graph database is a type of database whose concept is based on nodes and edges.

Graph databases are based on graph theory (a graph is a diagram of points and lines connected to the points). Nodes represent data or entity and edges represent connections between nodes. Edges own properties that can be related to nodes. This capability allows us to show more complex and deep interactions between our data. Now, to explain this interaction we will show it in a simple diagram

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to configure SQL Server 2017 on Linux with mssql-conf and other available tools

December 13, 2017 by

Configuration of any system plays a vital role in its working efficiently. However, configuring a system needs not necessarily be a daunting task. There are several tools that help with the process.

SQL Server on Linux provides a wide range of options for configuration, management and administration.

  1. mssql-conf
  2. Transact-SQL
  3. SQL Server Management Studio
  4. PowerShell
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Prashanth Jayaram

An introduction to a SQL Server 2017 graph database

December 4, 2017 by

The graph database is a critically important new technology for data professionals. As a database technologist always keen to know and understand the latest innovations happening around the cutting edge or next-generation technologies, and after working with traditional relational database systems and NoSQL databases, I feel that the graph database has a significant role to play in the growth of an organization. Not only are traditional database systems generally inefficient in displaying complex hierarchical data, but even NoSQL lags a little. We usually see a degradation in performance with the number of levels of relationship and database size. Also, depending on the relationship, the number of joins may increase as well.

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Vin Cannarelli

5 tips for working with SQL Server databases to support SharePoint

November 23, 2017 by

The SharePoint primer

If you are reading this, odds are you already work with SharePoint. So, isn’t reading a primer a waste of your time? Not really. As with all things tech, and more to the point Microsoft’s enterprise technology offerings, complete mastery is elusive. For instance, your SharePoint deployment should support sharing, collaboration, and content management depending on your organizational needs. But are you getting the most out of your deployment? And by the way, in how many ways can users collaborate?

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to set up SQL Server Log Shipping on Linux

November 13, 2017 by

Log shipping is a high-availability configuration that perhaps most of us are familiar with. It’s one of the oldest techniques wherein we ship transaction logs from a Primary database to a Secondary database. Log Shipping is still a vital feature used in case of applications that use warm standby for Disaster Recovery. We can see many articles which discuss the process of configuring Log shipping using T-SQL or SSMS.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

Using SSIS ForEach Loop containers to process files in Date Order

August 3, 2017 by

One positive thing to come out of my recent project that involved rewriting one of the Data Marts from our Data Warehouse environment was a confirmation of my suspicions with regards to the behavior of SQL Server Integration Services’ (SSIS) ForEach Loop Container. You see, I have long suspected that the ForEach File Enumerator type in SSIS’s ForEach Loop Container does not process time stamped text files in an order that could be deemed correct to the human eye. For instance, Figure 1 shows a list of text files containing data relating to Marital Statuses of FIFA 2016 Ballon D’Or nominees.

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Prashanth Jayaram

Installation of SQL Server vNext CTP on Linux Distribution CentOS 7

May 10, 2017 by

It was a paradigm shift in December 2016, when Microsoft made their SQL Server database available for Linux; it was the first time in history that Microsoft ever designed SQL Server to run on a non-Windows operating system. SQL Server vNext was released for public preview so the user community could test and deploy SQL Server on a Linux operating system. Microsoft took a major step in diversifying the database technology into the non-windows platform for the first time.

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Marko Zivkovic
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How to connect and use Microsoft SQL Server Express LocalDB

May 9, 2017 by

Microsoft SQL Server Express LocalDB is intended for developers, it is very easy to install and doesn’t require any complex configuration task to create an instance or to use the database. The Introduction on the installation of Local DB be found on “How to install Microsoft SQL Server Express LocalDB” article.

This article will show different ways of connecting to LocalDB and how to create and use an instance of LocalDB.

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Marko Zivkovic
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How to install Microsoft SQL Server Express LocalDB

May 9, 2017 by

Microsoft SQL Server Express LocalDB, a solution primarily intended for developers, is a lightweight version of SQL Server Express. It is very easy to install and set up. The installation copies a minimum set of files which are necessary to start SQL Server Database Engine. LocalDB supports the same T-SQL language and has the same limitations as SQL Server Express.

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Daniel Calbimonte

How to migrate MySQL tables to SQL Server using the SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) and SSIS

April 25, 2017 by

Introduction

In this article, we will demonstrate how to migrate MySQL tables to SQL Server using the SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) and SSIS. We will give a brief introduction to MySQL and create a table. If you do not have any experience in MySQL, this tutorial will teach you your first steps. After that, we will migrate the created table and existing tables. We will also mention common problems when we migrate tables.

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Daniel Calbimonte

SQL Server vNext – Does Microsoft love Linux?

April 21, 2017 by

Introduction

In the 90s and at the beginning of the 21 century, Linux and Windows were decidedly working at cross purposes

However, starting on 2009, Microsoft started to contribute with code in the Linux Kernel. On 2013, Azure supported Virtual Machines in Ubuntu and later came the support to .NET in Linux, Visual Studio for Linux, PowerShell in Linux, support to monitor Linux server to monitor in SCOM (System Center Operation Manager) and now, the support for SQL Server that is on the previous version when this article was published and it is planned to be released this year (2017). Microsoft is a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation now.

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Paul Stanton

How to use Windows hosted file shares to support SQL Server containers

February 23, 2017 by

In a previous article, Automate Delivery of SQL Server Production Data Environments Using Containers, we introduced SQL Server containers for delivery of production data environments to development and QA teams. In this article we look at the methods used for working with SQL Server data, and use of file shares to support delivery of production databases with containers.

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Paul Stanton

Automate Delivery of SQL Server Production Data Environments Using Containers

January 12, 2017 by

There has been a lot of buzz about Docker and containers this year, and earlier this Fall Microsoft released container support in Windows Server 2016. WinDocks is a team of former Microsoft engineers, and we released an independent port of Docker’s open source in March of 2016. Full disclosure, I am a co-founder at WinDocks.

In this article we’ll take a look at the basics of containers, and the most popular use by SQL Server DBAs.

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